Online searchable item level catalogue and sample digital surrogate of the Archigram archives
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Westminster
Department Name: Faculty of Arch & the Built Environment
Abstract
The extraordinary influence of the mainly un built 1960s-70s architectural group Archigram is internationally acknowledged. Exhibitions of their work have toured major institutions worldwide, they were awarded the RIBA Gold Medal in 2002, and are recognised influences on many of the world's greatest contemporary architects and buildings. Yet the bulk of their visionary work remains un-catalogued and inaccessible, stored in domestic conditions, subject to dilapidation, sale and loss. In collaboration with Archigram members and their heirs, we aim to form an online, searchable, item level, descriptive catalogue and restricted digital surrogate of the work, for both specialist and public research.
Organisations
| Description | The main research questions interrogated were: 1) What is the extent and nature of the work of the architectural group Archigram? 2) How can these be meaningfully usefully organised and contextualised for researchers and other users? 3) What are the possibilities of the modern digital architectural archive, especially in the context of Archigram? 1) The material was not previously academically archived, and its extent was unknown. The custom-built website was therefore essential to the project, and developed its shape as the material was uncovered. Despite the group's vast influence on architectural thinking (evidenced, for instance, by the RIBA Gold Medal, 2002) very few projects were widely known. In format, these included experimental magazines, imaginary projects, 'real' projects, competitions, built buildings, exhibitions, writings, and events. Almost 10,000 images, 202 projects, and much related material was recovered, catalogued, digitised and made public. Material was being uncovered and delivered by the depositors throughout the project, and an iterative structure of integrated web design and cataloguing structure was devised as the project developed. The extent was roughly twice what had been anticipated, and was of an extremely broad range of types, including a large amount of valuable contextual information which went beyond the 'dates' in which the group were largely active (1961-74) and included many collaborations beyond the six members of the group. A body of audio-visual material was not included in the deposit of material by its authors because of its extreme fragility, and could be a subject for future researchers. The project revealed the extent of the visionary, influential and predictive work done by the group, who were principally known for technologically inspired, visionary projects which challenged the way in which society might work in an age of readily-available technology. But it also revealed the diverse nature of the works within this collection, allowing the user to uncover internal 'arguments' within its vast range of experimental project types, for instance, between its more 'conventional' practice work and its polemics 'against' conventional practice. The project thus fulsomely exposed, illustrated and extended speculations made by academics on Archigram's work for future detailed investigation (see for instance, Simon Sadler's work and essay, included on the site) and provided rich material for future research. Aspects of this were discussed in the accompanying interviews and research papers generated as part of the project and included on the site. 2) The custom built website replaced the original bid's proposal to house the material on the AHDS, which was suspended during the first year of the project. It was designed in collaboration between the EXP Research Group in the Department of Architecture and the Centre for Parallel Computing, School of Electronics and Computer Science, both at the University of Westminster. It aimed to be highly accessible for scholarly research and casual browsing as an integral part of the academic structure of the resource, and its specific shape was essential to the success of the project. The project took advantage of the collaboration of the original group members and their heirs, developing the original Archigram job numbering system to act as the basis of the collection, and divising other ways of organising, sorting and adding material. Original Archigram descriptive texts were uncovered and added wherever possible, alongside our own cataloguing identifiers, and a rich body of new interpretative work was added, including interviews with all the depositors, essays by leading academics including the Investigators. The project also created new basic identification text for all items, the first really substantial bibliography of Archigram's work and an extensive list and brief description of Archigram's many collaborators. A key aspect was the clarity and usability of the site, taking into account its broad target audience which aimed to included both academic and non-academic users, and both digital natives and those less comfortable with new technology, and the website was continually refined and redesigned, both back and front end, to accommodate this, alongside the new material as it was uncovered and deposited. The usability of the site (for non digital-natives) also became part of its clarity of content and archival structure, and the inclusion of non digitally expert academics in the website development and testing proved to be essential to developing this lucid usability. The site has been extensively used (as described in the Impact section) with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, showing very different types of usage, from academic study to casual browsing. It therefore exemplifies both the more traditional type of research activity and the technological enablement of more experimental types of study which Archigram's own work predicted. 3) The aims of overlapping both a popular and academic audience shadowed Archigram's own criteria and preoccupations. Archigram had provocatively explored the redundancy of fixed traditional architectural thinking in an age of extensive and often portable technology. The inevitable contradictions of experimental thought and academic standards were thus inherent in the project itself, and we sought to come to a best working outcome, focusing on the value of the material a wide range of anticipated users. The depositors of the material (Archigram and their heirs) retained the original copyright of their work. While they were keen to make their work available to students and scholars, it was imperative that high quality images could not be taken from it for commercial purposes. This meant a working limit upon the digital sizes of images included. This restricted some parts of what the project could offer - but enabled the project as a whole to be made available for online use. A high-resolution copy of all images is held, on disk, under restricted access at the University of Westminster library for bona-fide research use. The design of a custom-made website was fundamental to the success of the site The outreach, format and usability of the site have been enthusiastically reviewed by both academic experts and more casual users alike. (See under: Narrative Impact) Both of these groups seem to use the site widely (based on our analysis of Google Analytics which include substantial viewings on phones as well as prolonged periods of study in academic institutions). Inevitably, given the necessary overlapping of the two fields of practice - the academic and the experimental creative -the website's essential academic structure necessarily restricts aspects of the creative capacities inherent in the work. And yet the very success of the popular and academic use of the site: its vastly greater-than-expected presence on Twitter, for instance, and its popularity for casual browsing as well as as an academic resource, has been a creative output in itself, and makes it an effective demonstration of the real de-institutionalising powers of technology ¬- as well of as the compromises inherent in actually doing this. |
| Exploitation Route | The project created an innovative kind of academic archive, aimed not just at the research community but at a far wider audience, thereby overlapping academic and popular criteria. It therefore represents an example of the evolving format of digital academic projects as well as a rich resource in its own right. |
| Sectors | Construction,Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Other |
| URL | http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/ |
| Description | The Archigram Archival Project made the works of the seminal experimental architectural group Archigram (1961-) available free online for an academic and general audience. The project offers both an astonishing digital archive of material for future research and an easily accessible image bank of visual ideas for working designers. It was aimed at a wide online design community, discovering it through Google or social media, as well as a traditional academic audience, and has been widely acclaimed and extensively used in both fields. The project received 40,000 users and more than 250,000 page views in the first two weeks, taking the site into Twitter's Top 1000 sites, and a steady flow of visitors at around a hundred a day since then. By August 2012 the AAP had received 1,377,514 page views, 288,502 visits to the site, 133,351 individual visitors from 176 countries. Study of Google Analytics shows a wide spread of use types, including intensive use for many hours from inside academic institutions, as well as large numbers visiting it briefly on their phones. It was rated Outstanding by the AHRC on conclusion and shortlisted for the 2010 RIBA President's Award for Outstanding University-Based Research. Comments from leading academics in the field include: The Archigram Archival Project is perhaps without peer even among the best generally-accessible online resources (for instance, those of the FRAC, NAi, and the Fondation Le Corbusier). Indeed, I believe its accessibility should be an inspiration for other archival projects. ... The Archigram Archival Project is already surrounded on Google by blogs that are talking about it.... This is a significant cultural change for archives and augurs a demographic change in the way that archives are accessed and how interest in architecture is generated. Simon Sadler, Professor of Architecture and Urban History, University of California The Archigram Archival Project has created a truly outstanding new model for research-rich digital based projects internationally. With some 10, 000 images culled from the original Archigram Archive, it has made manifest a virtual palimpsest of narrative and visual content that brings not just the work but its creators and the whole era brilliantly to life. Easy to use, effective in its design and structure, it makes vast quantities of information available under basic typologies: projects; exhibitions, magazines and people. The AAP will be invaluable for specialists, but its colourful mosaic leads and clear navigation will attract and stimulate the general public. It is a great tribute to all its creators that the AAP retains the quality and even re-presents the heady excitement of the original work by Archigram members complete with the often controversial response to it. Irena Murray, Director and Sir Banister Fletcher Librarian, British Architectural Library I believe this website to be a very significant research project, one that transforms any user's understanding of one of England's most influential avant garde architecture movements. Perceptions of the nature of the contribution made by Archigram are radically altered by the extent and scope of the archive and the exceptionally user-friendly form in which this impressive body of work and contemporary commentary has been assembled in the rigorous, organised (historically and thematically) communication system. The interactivity of the website cannot be faulted. This research will make this era of architectural endeavour live for those who were there, so to speak, and for generations to come. Professor Leon van Schaick, Innovation Professor of Architecture, RMIT The site was well reviewed in the architectural design press, including: The Architects' Newspaper, (New York) Building Design, RIBA Journal, The Architects' Journal, Architectural Design, Architecture Today, as well as on thousands of blogs for example: http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/archigram-archive.html http://www.canadianarchitect.com/news/archigram-uncovered/1000368216/ http://www.dezeen.com/2010/04/22/archigram-archival-project-launched/ Tweets include: http://twitter.com/melstarrs/statuses/12878844171; http://twitter.com/domusweb/statuses/12425824347; http://twitter.com/mienoergaard/status/12515922601; http://twitter.com/jbacus/status/197156848879681536. AHRC final report Assessors' comments include: Much more was achieved than was anticipated...The project seems to have grasped the opportunities provided by new online presentation techniques... The project is hugely important for provoking further interest in the recent history of contemporary architecture and theory... The project is a real coup for the AHRC. The successful outcome was never inevitable and the project seems to have been superbly managed. There is no question that it represents extremely good value for money... Letter 01 Nov 2012/ RE PID 11768; AID 119249. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2010 |
| Sector | Construction,Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Other |
| Impact Types | Cultural |
| Title | Online Searchable Archive and High-Resolution Surrogate collection of images |
| Description | The depositors of the material (Archigram and their heirs) retained the original copyright of their work. While they were keen to make their work available to students and scholars, it was imperative that high quality images could not be taken from it for commercial purposes. This meant a working limit upon the digital sizes of images included. This restricted some parts of what the project could offer -- but enabled the project as a whole to be available for free online use. A high-resolution copy of all images is held, on disk, under restricted access at the University of Westminster library for bona-fide research use. The original proposal had been to lodge all material with the AHDS. However, with the suspension of this service in the first year of the project, we had the opportunity to tailor-make the database and especially to develop its usability and graphic appearance, to suit the material and the academic structure, which developed with the uncovery of material, as well as to design for the diverse audience groups expected to use the site. We have therefore been able to design the site to suit the specific academic structure of the material, to improve its accessibility and user experience for academics and casual users alike. The software was created from scratch to fit the needs of the project. Firstly, a customised database was created that was later translated into an online backend manager. This was developed by the website designers working in close collaboration with the Project Manager and Principal Investigator to understand how to build up this extensive datasource. The site needed to be very simple to use and accessible from several workstations while in development because of the massive amount of work needed on the cataloguing of the Archigram works. Both the backend and the frontend were developed by the website designers working in close collaboration with the team, especially the Project Manager and the Principal Investigator, and with planned stage presentations to the Steering Group and the Depositors for feedback and adjustment. The project demanded that we did not follow a 'standard' project development plan to allow for changing requirements (for instance, as more unknown material was found by the Depositors and added) thus changing organisational requirements in a way that an initial plan could never have forseen. The technical team firstly created a core system and built on this as the project developed. In this way, we developed exactly what was needed in a reasonable time frame, which would have been quite impossible with a standard development plan. The website also went through many visual redesigns, working to reduce it to the strictly necessary navigation, because we wanted it to be a neutral or almost 'invisible' medium for viewing the archive: the work thus generating its own context as far as practicable, so that the Archigram Archive itself became the dominant context. The technical details of how the site has been constructed are as follows: Software tools used: -LAMP configuration for server (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) -Apache 2.2 as web server -MySQL as database backend -PHP5 as programming language -JQuery as javascript framework -eAccelerator for caching -Espresso as PHP IDE -Adobe Photoshop -Google Maps for image zooming -Perl as scripting language -ImageMagik for image processing -PHPMyAdmin -Firebug -JW Player Technical methods used: -2d scanning and photography -General website development -Server scripting -Web browser scripting -Cataloguing and indexing -Searching and querying -Interface design -Streaming media -Accessibility analysis -Iterative design Data formats created TIFF, JPEG, PNG, GIF, MPEG4 videos, SQL database, XML Data transformation for resource dissemination Conversion from FileMaker Pro datasets to standard SQL database Production of compressed JPeg files from uncompressed TIFF files for web dissemination Metatdata standards: Embedded exif metadata in images. The work was been done in collaboration with the Centre for Parallel Computing in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Westminster, under Professor Stephen Winter. This department hosts and maintains the site. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | This is the substantial output of the Archigram Archival Project; all information on impact is included in that part of the report. |
| URL | http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk |